NPR’s Best Reads

Great news! Thieves I’ve Known was selected as one of NPR’s 2013 Best Reads. They featured it under “Eye-Opening Reads” and “Seriously Great Writing.” Thanks so much to the editors at NPR. “Storytelling carves a way out of a dead end in the opening story in this award-winning first collection, as a 15-year-old girl and her brother, 16, alternate ever more absurd storylines while walking home after a part-time job bagging groceries. Another pair of siblings communicate in sign language as they scavenge among the treasures in a wealthy family’s house. A young girl in charge of a circus’s rare albino camel; two runaway boys; a broken-down pitcher; and a woman whose finger is pierced by a sewing machine needle converge in the kaleidoscopic “Circus Night.” Tom Kealey honors these marginal and troubled young Americans with fierce honesty. — recommended by Jane Ciabattari, book critic and author of Stealing the Fire